The present invention relates to the field of multimedia information editing. In particular the present invention discloses a method for abstracting multimedia information.
Recording home videos with camcorders is much more popular than watching home recorded videos. One reason for this disparity is that unedited home video footage is usually long-winded, lacks visually appealing effects, and thus tends to be too time-consuming and boring to watch.
Manually editing home videos is the only way to make home videos more interesting to watch. However, video editing is difficult, time-consuming, and tedious task. Furthermore, the resulting video is inflexible and cannot adjust to the viewers"" needs. Instead, these needs must be anticipated during the creation of the edited video. For example, let us suppose that some friends visit you. Spontaneously you decide to show your guests video excerpts of your last vacation. To avoid boring your guests, you want to limit the amount of video viewing to 15 minutes. You could just show the guests a randomly selected fifteen-minute segment. However, this short little segment would not provide a good summary of the vacation. One could attempt to spend fifteen minutes viewing selected random segments by using fast-forward to select segments to view. By doing this, the actual viewing time would be reduced by the amount of time spent fast-forwarding.
One could have a pre-edited fifteen-minute segment. However, creating such an edited segment is a difficult, time-consuming, tedious task as noted earlier. Furthermore, if the guests appreciated the fifteen-minute version and asked for more, one would need longer edited versions to show or resort to showing the raw video. In contrast, if the guests are your parents, you want to show them a much longer video of your vacation. Thus, it would be desirable to have system for automatically editing video down to an arbitrarily specified length.
According to one embodiment, a method is provided for generating an abstract of video data. In one embodiment, the method comprises extracting timestamps from the video data. The timestamps identify a time when separate sections of the video data were recorded. The method further includes selecting one or more sections of the video data to generate the abstract, with the one or more sections of the video data selected based on the timestamps.